Documents contain expert knowledge that can be potentially reused across products and lifecycles. In this research, the aim is to reuse diagnostic knowledge from the assembly phase in the next design/planning stage, by acquiring knowledge from documents. While the acquisition itself is a separate research problem, an important part of the acquired knowledge is the context in which it is expressed in the documents. This context dictates the set of situations to which the knowledge applies. In this paper we study various methods from literature that address this challenge in different domains. We highlight current challenges faced in this work. Two possible means to identify sources of context that are built upon previous work are then discussed. Based on one of them, a method for understanding the context of issues in documents is then proposed. The implementation and evaluation of the method are ongoing.